from the now-that-that's-settled... dept

Cross-posted from

The prisoner’s dilemma, it seems, is still a profitable mine in economic academia.

A couple of researchers at the New York Fed are out with a new paper on capital controls. In it, conventional wisdom (and the aforementioned dilemma) proves right and the contrarian view, dating from the Asian financial crisis 15 years ago, wrong.

When countries simultaneously and independently engage in such interventions in the international flow of capital, not only global but individual welfare is adversely affected….

Countries decide to restrict the international flow of capital exactly when this flow is crucial to ensure cross-border risk sharing. Our findings point to the possibility of costly “capital control wars” and thus to significant gains from international policy coordination.

But here’s the really shocking revelation:

The paper does allow that restricting capital flows can make sense from the perspective of an individual nation. It’s just that in following this path, trouble is created for the broader global financial system.

from the the-full-list dept

We already noted this morning that the US, a bunch of European countries, and a sprinkling of other nations around the globe have refused to sign the new ITR agreement put together at the ITU's World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), even as ITU officials congratulate themselves on a job well done. Many people have asked who signed and who didn't. The ITU has an official list of signatures, which seems to slightly conflict with some earlier reports. Here's their graphic:

Perhaps more useful is this map, in which the signing countries are in black and the non-signing are in red. You might notice a few patterns.

Also, reporter Dave Burstein kindly sent along the full list (embedded below), with signatories in green, non-signatories in red and everyone else in white. The "everyone else" apparently includes countries who haven't paid up their dues and thus can't technically sign on yet, or who don't "have their credentials in order." In other words: bureaucratic blah blah blah. Europe, of course, dominates the non-signing countries. It's somewhat meaningless, but if you tally up population, the signatories cover 3.8 billion people, while the non-signatories cover 2.6 billion. And there are another ~600 million in play in those other countries.

So, what does it all mean? Very little right now. Even those countries that signed on still need to go through a ratification process -- and one hopes that people in some of those countries will realize that it's bad to be supporting a regime that wants political bureaucrats having anything to do with the internet, even if it's dipping a toe in the water. However, many of the countries don't much care about that, and simply want the new rules so they can try to control parts of the internet (and/or profit from it). The rules won't actually go into effect for a while. While they aren't binding, it is pretty customary for signatories to eventually adopt such rules locally.

The real story here is a world in which there are two competing visions for the future of the internet -- one driven by countries who believe the internet should be more open and free... and one driven by the opposite. Whether or not the ITU treaty is ever meaningful or effective, these two visions of the internet are unlikely to go away any time soon. The next decade is going to be filled with similar clashes as certain countries seek to limit what the internet can do, for their own political needs and desires. Seeing the initial breakdown of who's in which camp is useful, but this isn't over yet.

from the so-does-it-work? dept

The folks over at M-Lab have apparently updated their data on BitTorrent throttling to look at how much different ISPs throttle BitTorrent connections. TorrentFreak has an excellent summary of the data, showing that thanks to Comcast getting slapped down for its BitTorrent throttling years ago, there's very little happening in the US. Other countries, however, show a very different story (though it seems to vary wildly from ISP to ISP. For example, in the UK< 65% of BitTorrent traffic on BT gets throttled, but none gets throttled on O2. Similarly, up in Canada, 80% is throttled on Rogers, and none on Telus.

With all this data out, it will be interesting to see two things: (1) If people start switching providers based on this data -- and, no, not just for unauthorized access, but for all the many legitimate uses of BitTorrent these days. (2) If this leads to any additional research on the impact of throttling. This data points to some areas where researchers could do either cross-country comparisons between those that have high throttling and those that have low throttling, or intra-country comparisons between ISPs with exceptionally different policies.

from the um,-really? dept

As we continue the fight over SOPA and PROTECT IP (PIPA), the MPAA and the politicians supporting these bills are ratcheting up the ridiculousness. You may recall that we recently highlighted the absolutely ridiculous paper by Daniel Castro for the shill shop ITIF, supposedly responding to SOPA/PIPA critics, but really showing just how weak and ridiculous the arguments on the pro-censorship side are. One of the points Castro raises is that DNS filtering "works." How does he know? Because, he points out, thirteen countries already do DNS filtering and research from Harvard suggests not too many people try to get around the filters.

Of course, Castro doesn't happen to name those thirteen countries, so you have to go digging for them, which is how you come up with the following list:

China

Iran

United Arab Emirates

Armenia

Ethiopia

Saudi Arabia

Yemen

Bahrain

Burma (Myanmar)

Syria

Turkmenistan

Uzbekistan

Vietnam

Yes, it's a sort of a who's who of the most repressive regimes on the planet. I think the only reason North Korea didn't make the list is because no one has internet access there. So this raises two key points. Perhaps the reason the filtering has worked in those countries, and not too many people try to get around the filters, is because they know if they're caught, they might get locked up or killed.

But, more to the point: is this really the list of countries that Lamar Smith, Patrick Leahy, the MPAA and Daniel Castro think that the US ought to go about emulating? Really?